The sociologist and political scientist Frances Fox Piven and her late husband Richard Cloward have been famously credited by Glenn Beck with devising the “Cloward/Piven Strategy,? a world view responsible, according to Beck, for everything from creating a “culture of poverty? and fomenting “violent revolution? to causing global warming and the recent... more...

Historical study of the functions of the relief system in America reveals that its policies are cyclical, expanding in times of civil disorder and contracting once political stability is restored more...

Have the poor fared best by participating in conventional electoral politics or by engaging in mass defiance and disruption? The authors of the classic Regulating The Poor assess the successes and failures of these two strategies as they examine, in this provocative study, four protest movements of lower-class groups in 20th century America: -- The... more...

In response to the riots of the mid-‘60s, Walter Thabit was hired to work with the community of East New York to develop a plan for low- and moderate-income public housing. In the years that followed, he experienced first-hand the forces that had engineered East New York’s dramatic decline and that continued to work against its successful... more...